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From creator and writer Sam Shaw (“Masters of Sex”) and Emmy® Award-winning director Thomas Schlamme (“The West Wing”), the second season of WGN America’s critically acclaimed and Emmy-nominated drama “Manhattan” follows the tangled lives of the residents of Los Alamos, New Mexico, as they race to create the first nuclear bomb in history. Locked away in the world’s most secretive city, the scientists and their families surrender their freedoms, compromise their marriages, and even sacrifice their sanity to end one war and usher in another — the Cold War waiting just over the atomic horizon — all while embedded spies and a climate of paranoia threaten to destroy the project from within.

“Manhattan” stars Emmy-nominated actor John Benjamin Hickey (“The Big C,” “The Good Wife”) as Frank Winter, a brilliant and unrelenting physicist who was the driving force behind the design of the world’s first weapon of mass destruction and who’s now beginning to question how it will be used; Olivia Williams (“Rushmore,” “The Ghost Writer”) as his wife, Liza Winter, an accomplished scientist in her own right who battles the Hill’s draconian security state presided over by Col. Emmett Darrow, the new ranking military officer played by Golden Globe®-nominated actor William Petersen (“CSI:Crime Scene Investigation”); and Ashley Zukerman (“Rush”) and Emmy® Award-nominated actress Rachel Brosnahan (“House of Cards,” “The Dovekeepers”) who play Charlie and Abby Isaacs, a young couple who both embrace and struggle with their unexpected new power on The Hill. The ensemble cast also features Katja Herbers (“The Americans,” “De Storm”) as the tough, witty and bright Dr. Helen Prins, one of the few female physicists working on the Project; Christopher Denham (“Argo,” “Shutter Island”) as Jim Meeks, a former student of Frank Winter’s who has become an unlikely spy for the Soviet Union; Harry Lloyd (“The Theory of Everything,” “Game of Thrones”) as the polished, privileged British physicist Paul Crosley; and Michael Chernus (“Orange Is The New Black,” “The Big C”) as the sweet and affable scientist Louis “Fritz” Fedowitz – one of the few whose personal life has flourished in New Mexico’s city of secrets.

Mamie Gummer (“Ricki and the Flash,” “The Good Wife”) joins the season two cast as Nora, a member of the Women’s Army Corps assigned to a post at Los Alamos, and Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actor Griffin Dunne (“Dallas Buyers Club,” “After Hours”) plays Woodrow Lorentzen, a tenacious and self-destructive newspaper reporter who finds his way inside the gates of The Hill and discovers not only the scoop of a lifetime, but a chance to turn his life around. Also joining the cast in season two is Neve Campbell (“Scream 4,” “Mad Men,” “Party of Five”) in the role of Kitty Oppenheimer, the formidable and mercurial First Lady of Los Alamos whose intersection with Abby Isaacs will affect both their husbands and the future of the project.